There’s been lots and lots of talk out there about the next phase of communication, especially with the launch of Google Wave, which some people see as the successor to e-mail. Admittedly, I’m not terribly excited about Wave, but there are two factors at work here:

1. I’ve only had it for a few days.
2. Jonathan’s the only person I’ve sent Waves to.

I’m not dismissing it, certainly, but it seems like a tool I’d use for work, rather than completely overhauling my entire communication strategy. We’ll see how that pans out.

But then the other day I heard about Mozilla Raindrop. Now for those of you who only know Mozilla as the creator of the Firefox Web browser, you should know that the organization works on many projects. In fact, I like the Thunderbird e-mail client quite a lot. But in Mozilla Labs there’s a new project called Raindrop that is supposed to unify messaging from multiple protocols.

The Raindrop team’s blog post said that rather than trying to create a new type of communication technology, their service is intended to make different (and mostly incompatible) protocols for communication available in one place to make them more manageable.

Raindrop will have its own application programming interface (API) and will be open source. So it should be pretty easy to get everyone to work seamlessly with one another. I’m looking forward to learning more about it, though there’s no downloadable installer as of right now.

So we’ll see what happens.

If you’re interested in learning more about some of these technologies, take a look at these articles:

How Firefox Works
How Google Works
How E-mail Works